I’ve lost track of where it is at the moment, but someone put together a WONDERFUL collage of news stories / headlines stretching back over the last fifty to a hundred years . The wonderful part of it was the way they alternately kept predicting ice ages and global warming!

:> MJM P.S. Floods are caused by smokers. You’ll note that all those floods you showed occurred AFTER the introduction of the Evil Cigarette to the British Isles! Now some might point to Noah and claim that his flood had nothing to do with smoking, but, when you ask them to provide PROOF that he didn’t smoke, they’re totally unable to!

Whether Noah smoked or not is unknown but he obviously ‘saved’ the tobacco plant, along with all the other seeds of the Earth,from the flood and therefore is guilty as charged M’ Ludd Arnott. Anyways he was not only a DRINKER of WINE but a PAEDO too boot exposing himself to innocent CHEEELDREN!

Genesis 9: 21He drank of the wine and became drunk, and uncovered himself inside his tent. 22Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside.…

Anna, you should know that they changed it to Climate Change because the only thing warming were the computers that ran the models that generated heat out of nothing contrary to all scientific principles.

The floods in Norfolk at the turn of the 20th century were, according to my great grandfather that saw them, a mixture of bad weather and some bad decisions made by the local authorities (in the case of Ormsby the local broad had been allowed to fill with more reed than normal and Norwich was partly caused by the Yare being partly blocked further dowm).

The floods we see today are caused by bad weather and some very bad decisions made by incompetent people.

I seem to recall that Denis Howell’s specialism was ending drought – back in ’76 when he was appointed Minister for the Drought, it suddenly started raining. Amazing man – climate change knew it had met its master when Denis came along. He wasn’t called Denis H2Owell for nothing.

Has any politician been guilty of saying these floods are because of global warming? I recall a few years ago, politicians were guilty of saying all odd weather (hot, cold, wet or dry) was because of global warming, but now they don’t so much.

f(i) or f(ii)? You do know, Moley, that we have two Popes. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think but, at the moment, one is a Nazi and the other is an Argie. I have not yet worked out which one of the buggers is to blame for the floods and so I would like to register half a vote each.

The earlier floods seem be caused by men and boys wearing flat caps or perhaps horse flatulence, the later floods are a mystery as no flat caps or horses are apparent.

Who do I apply to for a government grant to test that theory, would it be DEFRA or COBRA or UEA or the Met Office (Self described as -Met Office weather and climate change forecasts for the UK and worldwide. World leading weather services for the public, business, and government.) Got that! world leading climate change forecasts-makes you proud , eh?

They seem to think that -“More research is urgently needed to deliver robust detection of changes in storminess and daily/hourly rain rates and this is an area of active research in the Met Office. The attribution of these changes to anthropogenic global warming requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall. Such models are now becoming available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investments in flood and coastal defences.” Your tax money at work!

Perhaps if I appear at Ed Millibands office with a flat cap and miners boots he could assist me with my grant application.

“A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

Not to mention the fact that Met Office (yes, that one) records show that precipitation in the winter of 1929 was significantly worse than what we are experiencing. This is the same Met Office that forecast a drier than usual winter. It’s also the same Met Office that has forecast global temps to be higher than they were for 13 of the last 14 years.

I suppose this could be seen as the Coalition’s “Foot & Mouth” moment…….

Interestingly enough, the EU and the Environment Agency may be implicated in what the media projected as a fiasco at the time:

“… foot and mouth treatment policy passed from the hands of the British government to the European level as a result of European Community directive, 85/511. This set out procedures such as protection and “surveillance zones”, the confirmation of diagnosis by laboratory testing and that actions had to be consulted with the EU and its Standing Veterinary Committee. An earlier directive, 80/68, on the protection of groundwater gave powers to the Environment Agency to prohibit farm burials and the use of quicklime unless the site was authorised by the Agency.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mouth_outbreak

(v) Antarctica: The Admiral Byrd expedition found and photographed a mountain composed totally of coal, indicating former lush growth here. They also found ancient palm trees under the ice.

(vi) Antarctica: In 1968, in the mountains of central Antarctica, an American expedition came upon the jaw bone of a crocodile-like amphibian (called a labyrinthodont), as well as skeletons of other animals – creatures that could have survived only in a warm to hot climate. Similar finds were made again in 1986.

(viii) In these same northern polar regions are numerous fossil trees: beech, myrtle, laurel, breadfruit, cinnamen, oak, walnut, banana, grape vines, and so on. And from a line north of Labrador across to Alaska: giant sequoias.

(ix) Spitzbergen and Greenland now shiver in darkness for half of the year and lie almost continuously under snow and ice. Yet a rich, temperate flora once covered these icy wastes in the Arctic Ocean. Fossil remains of magnolias, fig trees, palms, arborescent ferns (which are typically tropical) and animals from warm climates have been discovered… also pines, firs, spruces, cypresses, elms, hazels and water lilies.

(x) South polar region: Redwood forests are found buried under massive ice deposits. These towering giants (now typically found in the north-west of the U.S.A.) once flourished in many diverse parts of the world, as evidenced by many coal and fossil finds.

(xi) Back to the Arctic Circle: Here are two very interesting island groups – the New Siberian Islands and the Spitzbergen Islands. Remarkable things have been reported by explorers who have been there. Immense frozen gravel mounts were discovered to have entombed within them entire fruit trees with the fruit still on them. (D.G. Whitley, “ The Ivory Islands in the Arctic Ocean”, Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great Britain, XII, 1910, p.49. Cited in Earth in Upheaval, by Immanuel Velikovsky, Dell ed., 1955, p.19)

(xii) In the New Siberian Islands, whole palm trees have been found, with their leaves and fruit.

Others concur:

“There is but one climate known to the ancient fossil world as revealed by the plants and animals entombed in the rocks, and the climate was a mantle of springlike loveliness which seems to have prevailed continuously over the whole globe. Just how the world could have thus been warmed all over may be a matter of conjecture; that it was so warmed effectively and continuously is a matter of fact. When nearly the same plants are found in Greenland and Guinea; when the same species, now extinct, are met with of equal development at the equator as at the pole, we cannot but admit that at this period the temperature of the globe was nearly alike everywhere. “(10)“ What we now call climate was unknown in these geological times. There seems to have been then only one climate over the whole globe.”(11) Paleobotanist R.W. Chaney has shown from fossil plants that the climate was slightly warmer near the equator and cooler near the poles. (12) There were these slight differences of latitude climate, but not the present zonal extremes. Overall, the climate of Planet Earth was mild and springlike, perfect from pole to pole.

There is good reason to believe that this world of perfect climate existed within the memory of the human race. The traditions of ancient humanity preserve the recollection of it. The ancient Chinese say that before the great Catastrophe, “ four seasons succeeded each other regularly and without confusion. There were no impetuous winds, nor excessive rains. The sun and moon, without ever being clouded, furnished a light purer and brighter than now.”(13) Numerous ancient traditions contain details of the world “ before the Flood” , details which seem to stem from a common origin: the original perfect state; a glorious land; long age spans; but growing disobedience to spiritual laws and eventual destruction. (9)

Yeah, but isn’t all that because the South Pole wasn’t where it is now, at the times all these critters deposited their bones? Continental Drift is a much overlooked global phenomenon. It kinda takes the ground away from under your feet.http://www.enchantedlearning.com/cgifs/Continentaldrift.gif

It’s obesity. S’obvious. We are all putting on weight (well, I am) and it is causing the land to sink. Look at Eric Pickles. The sandbags are making it worse. You didn’t see all these floods before the sandbags, did you? Well then.

If we all jumped up in the air and stayed there, the country would bob up under our feet. The government ought to coordinate it.

I currently live in Australia where there is Shock and Awe every year as it is riven by either flood or fire. The first Europeans here scoffed at the Aboriginals who told stories of their legends going back at least 40,000 years of similar yearly accounts. Except they allowed it to happen as they discovered, Lo & behold that fire and flood remarkably, renewed the earth and kept it fertile whilst imported European farming methods tended to wreck the soil after about 40/50 years.

Aren’t you comparing apples and pears here? A valid image in some parallel universe would be the extent of flooding this year’s rain would have caused if pitted against the flood defences of, for example, North Ormsby in 1903. Or conversely, the impact of North Ormsby’s 1903 rainfall on today’s flood defences.

Alan Caruba, whose blog gets rather widely reblogged around the net (Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do bloggers like the exposure? Or do they feel it takes away from their own blog visits? Dunno.) had a good article on this “global warming” problem today:

So your suggestion is that because there have always been extreme weather events in the past that this somehow provides some kind of evidence against the theory of climate change? It really doesn’t.

If climate change IS real, then it means we will likely experience an increase in the FREQUENCY of extreme weather events such as the recent flooding. I’ve failed to find any climate scientists suggesting that floods are a brand new phenomena and as such this argument is a really dire effort to disprove the theory.

I doubt that anything will change your mind of course. Ah well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter because physics doesn’t give a toss about what any of us think. If Climate change is real then it will impact our lives increasingly over the coming years regardless of any denials to the contrary. I guess the real shame would be that the damage caused could be much worse because we keep pretending it’s not happening and so the mitigating actions required are not taken seriously.

The two comments you recently replied to were spam comments. This blog receives 100s of strange and often unintelligible spam comments every week, however 99% of them are removed by a sophisticated anti-spam mechanism here. The two spam comments that you replied to were rare exceptions that got through the spam defences and have been removed.

This same anti-spam software also causes normal comments which contain two or more web links to be temporary blocked. Anna or the temp bar staff (unpaid!) will usually unblock these as soon as they are noticed.

Ah, Spam! Indeed it was, but at my age, you take your troll fat wherever you can get it. But humours are in the eyes of the beholder, and when those of others are less clear, or their digestive system copes less well with the canned variety, we verbal diarists, on our travels through the blogospheric electronic Sky Rim, full of bandits, hag ravens, Magic Whispering-Trolls and the like, often take an arrow to the knee from friendly fire

There is a fantastic Farmville (FV) cheat that makes harvesting go much, much faster. Some companies have offers like they give you a certain number of free calls for the month for a monthly rental. If we don’t fork over our cash at the movie theater the movie moguls have a back-up plan.